1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for generating a play list in a portable multimedia player. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for analyzing a user experience pattern by using various means and for generating a play list according to the experience pattern.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the widespread use of terminals (e.g., MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) players, mobile phones, Portable Media Players (PMP), etc.) as portable devices for listening to music, data compression techniques and data storage media have been developed. As a result, the terminals can store hundreds of music files.
According to a method of playing back music files stored in the terminal by a user, a plurality of songs are played back by selecting only one song or by selecting several songs contiguously. Examples of the method of continuously playing back the plurality of songs include playing back songs sequentially in the order of the songs stored in the terminal according to a specific rule, playing back songs in a shuffle mode, and sequentially playing back a plurality of songs selected by the user. When songs are played back in the shuffle mode, the plurality of songs stored in an MP3 player is played back in a random sequence. When using the aforementioned three methods for playing back the plurality of songs, the terminal generates a play list which indicates an order of the plurality of songs to be continuously played back, and plays back the plurality of songs included in the generated play list.
FIG. 1 is a flowchart illustrating the conventional method of managing a multimedia play list.
Referring to FIG. 1, when a music file is stored in a multimedia player such as an MP3 player in step 100, an album title, a singer's name, or the like may be pre-recorded in each music file tag or may be manually written by a user in step 110. The play list can be generated according to information existing in the music file tag in step 120. For example, if the singer's name is set to ‘John Doe’ in the play list, a music file in which the singer's name is ‘John Doe’ is inserted to the play list by filtering each music file's tag. In this case, if there is no content recorded in the tag, filtering is not performed correctly. Therefore, in order to perform correct filtering, the user has to manually write information of a specific music file to the tag.
FIG. 2 is a flowchart illustrating a conventional management method including a process of selecting a stored music file directly by a user.
Referring to FIG. 2, although a music file may be stored in a multimedia player such as an MP3 player in step 200 and the user may select the desired music file in step 202, there is a disadvantage in that the user has to manually select a music file to be included in the play list after searching many music files one by one, and has to re-create the play list when the user desires to listen to music of other genres in step 204.
In addition, since the conventional multimedia player plays back songs in the same order as that of storing songs or plays back the songs in the shuffle mode, the user cannot listen to the desired music immediately, and several key manipulations are inevitable, which result in user inconvenience. When the user pre-selects a plurality of songs, the user has to individually select the plurality of songs while viewing a menu, which leads to inconvenience of multiple key manipulations. The method of generating the play list according to a user's preference also has a problem in that the list may include an item not desired by the user since the list is not written based on objective data. Furthermore, since standardized items (e.g., artist, title, genre, etc.) can be input to tag information of a music file, there is a disadvantage in that a variety of tag information cannot be input.